During his campaign for president, Donald Trump promised, “We’re going to win so much, you’re going to be so sick and tired of winning.” If the American Health Care Act that the House passed on Tuesday is an indication, perhaps what he meant was that citizens would be both ill and also exhausted from victories.

The celebration that Trump threw in the Rose Garden on Thursday, marking the House’s passage of the bill after a series of false starts, was strange for a couple of reasons. The first is that the bill had just barely passed the House, after an acrimonious fight that divided the Republican Party, and stands no chance of emerging from the Senate in a form remotely resembling the House bill. Furthermore, the House bill is a field of landmines for the GOP. Without a CBO score, no one really has a good sense what the bill will cost or what it will do.

Despite that, Trump threw a party at his house, inviting a beaming Republican delegation for press remarks. In contrast, when the House passed the Affordable Care Act in November 2009, Obama delivered brief remarks, alone, in the Rose Garden, recognizing that the bill had a long way to go before it passed the Senate. (Indeed, it took four months and nearly collapsed in between.)

Even stranger was the content of Trump’s statement. There was laughter and gaiety, but the president said literally almost nothing about what is in the bill or who would benefit from it. Here are all the parts of his remarks that touched on policy:

As far as I’m concerned, your premiums, they’re going to start to come down. We’re going to get this passed through the Senate. I feel so confident. Your deductibles, when it comes to deductibles, they were so ridiculous that nobody got to use their current plan—this nonexistent plan that I heard so many wonderful things about over the last three or four days. After that, I mean, it’s—I don’t think you’re going to hear so much....

And I think, most importantly, yes, premiums will be coming down. Yes, deductibles will be coming down. But very importantly, it’s a great plan. And ultimately, that’s what it’s all about.

So, in sum: Trump says that the bill will reduce deductibles and reduce premiums. In fact, for most Americans, both of these statements may well be false. Because the CBO has not yet scored the current version of the bill, it’s hard to tell, but in its previous version, AHCA was set to jack up premiumsand deductibles overall.

Most of what Trump said was a simple celebration of winning: “A lot of people said, how come you kept pushing health care, knowing how tough it is? Don’t forget, Obamacare took 17 months. Hillary Clinton tried so hard—really valiantly, in all fairness, to get health care through. Didn’t happen. We’ve really been doing this for eight weeks, if you think about it. And this is a real plan. This is a great plan. And we had no support from the other party.”

Of course, the reason it only took eight weeks is that the bill is held together with duct tape and spit. That’s also the reason Trump isn’t talking about the substance of the bill in his remarks. First, he does not have a good handle on what’s actually in it, or even what it purports to do; second, it’s hard to make concrete statements about what it will do without a CBO score; and third, it doesn’t remotely resemble what he claimed during the campaign that his health-care plan would achieve.

Trump made a series of promises during the campaign. He said his plan would guarantee coverage for all people. He said there would be no cuts to Medicaid. He said no one would lose their coverage. He said costs would go down. And he insisted the protections guaranteeing coverage for people with preexisting conditions would remain in place. The House bill fails on every one of these counts.

Once again, the contrast with Obama is instructive. He cared deeply about winning on health care, pushing forward on the bill despite political costs. His chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, told staffers, “The only nonnegotiable principle here is success. Everything else is negotiable.” The law that became known as Obamacare was deeply flawed, as many Democrats now admit, and the party made a series of painful compromises to get a bill through.

Still, Obama kept the beneficiaries in the public spotlight and demanded an expansion of coverage and protections for people with preexisting conditions. When the House passed the ACA, Obama told the story of a woman he’d spoken with that summer. “Because of a medical condition, Katie's insurance policy was suddenly revoked when she needed it most, even though she was paying her premiums,” Obama said. “I called Katie this morning, and I told her that when the bill that passed last night becomes law, we'll be able to protect Americans just like her from the kinds of insurance company abuses she had to endure.”

When the law passed in 2010, Obama welcomed people who would benefit from the law, and family members of people who might have benefited, to the signing ceremony. And he spent much of his speech focusing on what the law would provide.

The absence of any such discussion, or examples, or guests at the Rose Garden is glaring. Trump not only couldn’t claim to have kept his campaign promises; he apparently could not or did not bother to make the case for who would benefit from the law. The problem may be, as Matt O’Brien argues, that the bill is “a tax cut masquerading as a health-care proposal,” and would make coverage worse by and large, which makes it challenging to portray as an improvement in coverage.

Setting aside the much-maligned homogeneity of the crowd at Trump’s announcement, the people who were not there were as conspicuous as those who were. Trump could have found people who would benefit from the law, and not merely wealthy people who might pay less. He could have brought forward some of the people who have had to pay more for insurance since Obamacare passed. The president even hosted a listening session with some of them in March.

But there was no mention of these people on Thursday. For one thing, it’s not clear the bill will help them. For another, Trump appears too focused on winning to care about what the bill actually achieves. After a series of setbacks in Congress and in the courts, he cares far more about the victory than the terms on which it was won. As the health-care debate moves to the Senate, the president may discover, like King Pyrrhus, that sometimes the costs of victory outweigh the benefits.

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Five times a day for the past three months, an app called WeCroak has been telling me I’m going to die. It does not mince words. It surprises me at unpredictable intervals, always with the same blunt message: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

Sending these notices is WeCroak’s sole function. They arrive “at random times and at any moment just like death,” according to the app’s website, and are accompanied by a quote meant to encourage “contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation.” Though the quotes are not intended to induce nausea and despair, this is sometimes their effect. I’m eating lunch with my husband one afternoon when WeCroak presents a line from the Zen poet Gary Snyder: “The other side of the ‘sacred’ is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.”

The president is the common thread between the recent Republican losses in Alabama, New Jersey, and Virginia.

Roy Moore was a uniquely flawed and vulnerable candidate. But what should worry Republicans most about his loss to Democrat Doug Jones in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate race in Alabama was how closely the result tracked with the GOP’s big defeats last month in New Jersey and Virginia—not to mention how it followed the pattern of public reaction to Donald Trump’s perpetually tumultuous presidency.

Jones beat Moore with a strong turnout and a crushing lead among African Americans, a decisive advantage among younger voters, and major gains among college-educated and suburban whites, especially women. That allowed Jones to overcome big margins for Moore among the key elements of Trump’s coalition: older, blue-collar, evangelical, and nonurban white voters.

Russia's strongman president has many Americans convinced of his manipulative genius. He's really just a gambler who won big.

I. The Hack

The large, sunny room at Volgograd State University smelled like its contents: 45 college students, all but one of them male, hunched over keyboards, whispering and quietly clacking away among empty cans of Juicy energy drink. “It looks like they’re just picking at their screens, but the battle is intense,” Victor Minin said as we sat watching them.

Clustered in seven teams from universities across Russia, they were almost halfway into an eight-hour hacking competition, trying to solve forensic problems that ranged from identifying a computer virus’s origins to finding secret messages embedded in images. Minin was there to oversee the competition, called Capture the Flag, which had been put on by his organization, the Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian. ARSIB runs Capture the Flag competitions at schools all over Russia, as well as massive, multiday hackathons in which one team defends its server as another team attacks it. In April, hundreds of young hackers participated in one of them.

Brushing aside attacks from Democrats, GOP negotiators agree on a late change in the tax bill that would reduce the top individual income rate even more than originally planned.

For weeks, Republicans have brushed aside the critique—brought by Democrats and backed up by congressional scorekeepers and independent analysts—that their tax plan is a bigger boon to the rich than a gift to the middle class.

On Wednesday, GOP lawmakers demonstrated their confidence as clearly as they could, by giving a deeper tax cut to the nation’s top earners.

A tentative agreement struck by House and Senate negotiators would reduce the highest marginal tax rate to 37 percent from 39.6 percent, in what appears to be the most significant change to the bills passed by each chamber in the last month. The proposal final tax bill would also reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, rather than the 20 percent called for in the initial House and Senate proposals, according to a Republican aide privy to the private talks.

If Democratic candidate Doug Jones had lost to GOP candidate Roy Moore, weakened as he was by a sea of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, then some of the blame would have seemed likely to be placed on black turnout.

But Jones won, according to the Associated Press, and that script has been flipped on its head. Election Day defied the narrative and challenged traditional thinking about racial turnout in off-year and special elections. Precincts in the state’s Black Belt, the swathe of dark, fertile soil where the African American population is concentrated, long lines were reported throughout the day, and as the night waned and red counties dominated by rural white voters continued to report disappointing results for Moore, votes surged in from urban areas and the Black Belt. By all accounts, black turnout exceeded expectations, perhaps even passing previous off-year results. Energy was not a problem.

There’s a fiction at the heart of the debate over entitlements: The carefully cultivated impression that beneficiaries are simply receiving back their “own” money.

One day in 1984, Kurt Vonnegut called.

I was ditching my law school classes to work on the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate against Ronald Reagan, when one of those formerly-ubiquitous pink telephone messages was delivered to me saying that Vonnegut had called, asking to speak to one of Mondale’s speechwriters.

All sorts of people called to talk to the speechwriters with all sorts of whacky suggestions; this certainly had to be the most interesting. I stared at the 212 phone number on the pink slip, picked up a phone, and dialed.

A voice, so gravelly and deep that it seemed to lie at the outer edge of the human auditory range, rasped, “Hello.” I introduced myself. There was a short pause, as if Vonnegut were fixing his gaze on me from the other end of the line, then he spoke.

So many people watch porn online that the industry’s carbon footprint might be worse now that it was in the days of DVDs and magazines.

Online streaming is a win for the environment. Streaming music eliminates all that physical material—CDs, jewel cases, cellophane, shipping boxes, fuel—and can reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 40 percent or more. Video streaming is still being studied, but the carbon footprint should similarly be much lower than that of DVDs.

Scientists who analyze the environmental impact of the internet tout the benefits of this “dematerialization,” observing that energy use and carbon-dioxide emissions will drop as media increasingly can be delivered over the internet. But this theory might have a major exception: porn.

Since the turn of the century, the pornography industry has experienced two intense hikes in popularity. In the early 2000s, broadband enabled higher download speeds. Then, in 2008, the advent of so-called tube sites allowed users to watch clips for free, like people watch videos on YouTube. Adam Grayson, the chief financial officer of the adult company Evil Angel, calls the latter hike “the great mushroom-cloud porn explosion of 2008.”

In The Emotional Life of the Toddler, the child-psychology and psychotherapy expert Alicia F. Lieberman details the dramatic triumphs and tribulations of kids ages 1 to 3. Some of her anecdotes make the most commonplace of experiences feel like they should be backed by a cinematic instrumental track. Take Lieberman’s example of what a toddler feels while walking across the living room:

When Johnny can walk from one end of the living room to the other without falling even once, he feels invincible. When his older brother intercepts him and pushes him to the floor, he feels he has collapsed in shame and wants to bite his attacker (if only he could catch up with him!) When Johnny’s father rescues him, scolds the brother, and helps Johnny on his way, hope and triumph rise up again in Johnny’s heart; everything he wants seems within reach. When the exhaustion overwhelms him a few minutes later, he worries that he will never again be able to go that far and bursts into tears.

Will the vice president—and the religious right—be rewarded for their embrace of Donald Trump?

No man can serve two masters, the Bible teaches, but Mike Pence is giving it his all. It’s a sweltering September afternoon in Anderson, Indiana, and the vice president has returned to his home state to deliver the Good News of the Republicans’ recently unveiled tax plan. The visit is a big deal for Anderson, a fading manufacturing hub about 20 miles outside Muncie that hasn’t hosted a sitting president or vice president in 65 years—a fact noted by several warm-up speakers. To mark this historic civic occasion, the cavernous factory where the event is being held has been transformed. Idle machinery has been shoved to the perimeter to make room for risers and cameras and a gargantuan American flag, which—along with bleachers full of constituents carefully selected for their ethnic diversity and ability to stay awake during speeches about tax policy—will serve as the TV-ready backdrop for Pence’s remarks.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”